


A Note on Prison Camps

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [82]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Backstory, Canon Compliant, Essays, Fix-It, Gen, Prison camps, Psi Corps, Rogue Telepaths, Worldbuilding, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-24
Updated: 2017-11-24
Packaged: 2019-02-06 06:59:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12812160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: Someseriousfix-it regarding Dark Genesis' presentation of Psi Corps prison camps circa 2175.The prologue ofBehind the Glovesishere- please read!





	A Note on Prison Camps

**Author's Note:**

> What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).
> 
> If you like _Behind the Gloves_ and would like to send me an email, I can be reached at counterintuitive at protonmail dot com. Do you have questions? Would you like to tell me what you like about this project? Email me!
> 
> I also have an [ask blog](https://behind-the-gloves.tumblr.com/), a [writing blog](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/pallasite-writes), and a "P3 life" Tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/p3-life) with funny anecdotes. :)

There is too much mixed up with the writing of Dark Genesis, pages 138-143, 148-154 and 161-167 (the prison camp scenes) to be able to fix it line by line.

And you know me - if it could be done, I would have done it.

Instead, I offer you a "big picture" fix, with specific detail fixes as I go along.

  * **Mix up one: Psi Corps prison camps in 2175 are not what they are in 2265, at the time of the Telepath War.**



During the Telepath War, some very Horrible things happened in Psi Corps prison camps. We'll get there when we get there. Even in the years leading up to the war (at the time of the show, for instance), these prison camps were real prisons - which is what makes it _utterly terrifying_ that they're being mysteriously emptied out - not by rogues, of course, it turns out, but by Director Johnston himself, who is ordering the prisoners _sold to the Shadows_ in exchange for Shadowtech for EarthForce ships.

Ninety years before the Telepath War, however, the Corps' prison system was... well, not quite a _revolving door_ , but not much more than that. And this was no accident - the Corps' director, Kevin Vacit, supported the rogue telepaths, even as they killed and maimed their brethren, and he did so under the misguided belief that fostering such violence would actually "assist evolution."

(Guess who else holds such beliefs? ... **The Shadows.** That is literally why they fly around the galaxy trying to kill everyone - because they believe this will assist evolution. They do this on time scales of thousands to millions of years, however, while Vacit's trying to do it in _eighty_ years, or fewer (since he really doesn't know when the Shadows will show up). Evolution, obviously, does not work on such time scales, further underscoring how messed up it is that he supports the rogues' kidnapping, killing and maiming of telepaths (including children) in the name of somehow "assisting evolution." And the irony that he's trying to defeat the Shadows by acting just like them - even less rationally than them - DOES NOT ESCAPE ME.)

Vacit has intentionally underfunded, understaffed and under-resourced the prison camps to make it as easy as possible for rogue telepaths to escape.

This is why, on page 212, in 2188 (thirteen years later!) Senator Khalid Ahmed of the United Islamic Nations says to Vacit: "We both know where rogues can be found - here, on Earth, on every continent, in every country. And yet, oddly enough, though you direct a well-funded, highly organized institution with broader discretionary powers than any similar organization on or off Earth, these rogues seem to not only be thriving, but doing more damage each day. Bombings all over the globe. Schoolchildren snatched from testing lines. Three reeducation camps 'liberated' in as many months. And here you want to jaunt off to Venus."

He suspects the truth: Vacit has intentionally set it up such that three prison camps could be _emptied out_ by rogues in three months, and not because the rogues are so amazing or because Psi Cops are inept, but because the prison camps are  _intentionally_ understaffed, underfunded and under-resourced, and _intentionally_ have shit for infrastructure.

Let's take a look at this camp they take Fiona to:

Page 154: "They left the food line, moving toward the village 'square.' The camp was an old _kampung_ village - tin and concrete buildings, a few old-style houses up on stilts. Beyond that were the fences, three rows of them, stunfences with concertina wire strung along the top. There were supposed to be mines in between."

(There are, however, no mines, because 1) the Corps doesn't kill their own, and 2) mines would cost money. The guards say there are mines, to try to keep people from trying to escape.)

That's the camp - wooden houses on stilts, a few shitty buildings made of tin or concrete, and wire fences. Guard tower? No. Stone or concrete walls? No. Flood lights? No. Dogs? No. Alarms? No. Electricity? Er, um, sometimes?

Oh, and the camp is _staffed by mundanes_ (p. 149), because guess who isn't sending staff and guards to Malaysia (or anywhere) to guard the telepath prisoners?

A P5 can make a mess of a normal - now think about it. Telepath prisoners, mundane guards, a few Psi Cops. ...Not exactly hard to break out, if prisoners work together! (And the Corps (as always, even through the Telepath War) never, _never_ used sleepers on prisoners, as a matter of principle.)

So despite canon's repeated "YOU'RE ALL A BUNCH OF NAZIS!" references in these scenes, like this is supposed to be fucking Auschwitz, we can cut the shit right here - it's not the Waldorf Astoria, there's a lot of mud and bugs, but this camp probably has at most a few dozen prisoners, no one is killed there, and the biggest threat to inmates (and staff, and villagers nearby) is malaria. (And no one is tattooed, with their P-rating or anything else - prisoners wore bracelets, like the ones we see later in _Ship of Tears_ , the bracelet that belonged to Bester's lover, Carolyn.)

  * **Mix up two: Breaking out was straightforward.**



This is not Alcatraz, either. Fiona spends at most three, four days there before Stephen Walters, working for Vacit, sneaks in and breaks her out. (Fiona probably wasn't even there long enough to get an official bracelet, since that takes time to order.)

There are way too many writing errors in canon's version of events here to do a line by line fix. (A nineteen-year-old girl, with a broken leg, carries a fully grown man? "Out of nowhere" snake nerve toxin, in exactly the right dose? A computer that transfers control of a helicopter to someone who is NOT in the database as camp staff - to one of the prisoners' fake IDs? A chopper that flies after having been transferred to said fake ID? Fiona having no idea how to fly a chopper, but flying one perfectly anyway? No one stopping them or coming after them, despite, you know, being guards with guns? And the random "you killed a lot of people, so you have to have my baby" rape threat?! (There are no IVF facilities in that camp, obviously...))

No. Here's what happened, and it's a lot simpler.

1\. No one notices when Walters sneaks into the camp on a transport (a prisoner transport or a supply transport), because the camp isn't keeping track of things, the camp is staffed by mundanes whose minds he could easily alter, and no one expects anyone to try to break _in_.

2\. No one realizes he's not supposed to be there, because again, this camp isn't run competently at all.

3\. He finds Fiona. He creates a distraction (maybe sets one of the houses on fire), and while everyone's dealing with that, he takes out the generator (which takes down the electricity that powers the fence, and if it's night, what few lights exist in the camp), and cuts his way through the fence. Then he carries Fiona (see, broken leg) out of the camp, and Matthew joins them at her insistence. Walters is former special ops, and knows how to fly a chopper, so he hot-wires the chopper and flies them out of there, and no one even realizes they're gone until they've finished dealing the distraction he created. And the Psi Cops or guards can't fly after them because this was the only chopper they had, so they call the Corps and notify them about the break, and the Corps does nothing, because Vacit arranged the whole thing in the first place.

It's even simpler if the chopper is parked _inside the prison camp_ rather than outside the wire - then he just has to create a distraction (say, at night) and hot-wire the chopper.

It's meant to be a one-man job. And all three are strong telepaths, so they can drop any mundane guards who come after them, if any do. They just needed someone there who could hot-wire and fly a chopper.

**Author's Note:**

> I can't say with certainty "no one threatened to rape Fiona while she was at the camp," because shit happens and there are bad apples everywhere (and the Psi Cops at the camp weren't stationed there because they were "first draft pick"... or second... or third... in fact, they probably made a lot of enemies to get themselves stuck out there), but I can say that 1) this is not "Corps policy" or practice or whatever this is implying, and 2) the scene serves no purpose whatsoever other than to be like "LOOK HOW EVIL THE CORPS IS."


End file.
